Solid Waste News

This news item expired on 12/31/2014, so the information below could be outdated or incorrect.

11 Facts About Recycling

The average person generates over 4 pounds of trash every day and about 1.5 tons of solid waste per year.

Americans make more than 200 million tons of garbage each year, enough to fill Busch Stadium from top to bottom twice a day. Next time you’re at a sporting event or tailgate, host a trash-free tailgate using only recyclable materials Sign up for Trash-Free Tailgate.

Over 75% of waste is recyclable, but we only recycle about 30% of it.

We generate 21.5 million tons of food waste each year. If we composted that food, it would reduce the same amount of greenhouse gas as taking 2 million cars off the road.

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to listen to a full album on your iPod. Recycling 100 cans could light your bedroom for two whole weeks.

Recycling aluminum cans saves 95% of the energy used to make aluminum cans from new material.

Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic bottles every hour.

Over 87% of Americans have access to curbside or drop-off paper recycling programs.

In 2009, Americans threw away almost 9 million tons of glass. That could fill enough tractor trailers to stretch from NYC to LA (and back!).

In 2010, paper recycling had increased over 89% since 1990.

If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we could save about 25 million trees each year.